Supreme Court junks PIL on Rakesh Asthana’s appointment as BCAS chief

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) challenging the appointment of former CBI special director Rakesh Asthana as director general of Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS).


A bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi repeatedly questioned petitioner-cum-advocate M L Sharma to decipher what he had pleaded in the PIL and how so many different issues, including keeping Asthana under suspension and making Parliament approval mandatory to remove the CBI director, be clubbed together.

With repeated questions failing to evoke a response from the petitioner, the bench of CJI Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna rejected the PIL. “Multiple causes of action have been combined, one having no connection with the other. While some of the relief sought may lie, if at all, within the jurisdiction of the service tribunal, the other relief sought are not appropriate for being dealt with in the manner in which they have been projected. We, therefore, decline to entertain this PIL,” it said.